After the first European data centre, TikTok will use two other data centres on European soil—in an attempt to address the EU’s data concerns.
The Chinese TikTok is extremely popular in Europe, with more than 150 million monthly users. But it concerns a Chinese company where it is not always clear where your data is stored outside the EU, and it is unclear by whom it is viewed, which is very sensitive. Partly for this reason, the US company has already partnered with Oracle, which locally checks the data and the algorithm.
TikTok is now announcing two new data centres for Europe. It announced the first data centre in Ireland, which is now in an ‘advanced stage’. An external service provider will develop a second data centre in Ireland and a third data centre ‘in Europe’ to supplement this.
TikTok says that European users’ data will be transferred to the local data centres in the coming months until 2024.
TikTok’s steps should give the company more confidence in Europe. In any case, it imposes stricter rules on content moderation via the Digital Services Act (DSA). But there are also questions about who can view the data. At the end of last year, owner ByteDance admitted that the company’s employees had used TikTok data to track down journalists.
